Anti-feminism and gender-based violence in Germany

In the last decades, the uprise of feminist movements and politics has been accompanied by increasing efforts to restrict or undermine women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. Gender-based violence has increasingly received attention in the media, policy discourses, and feminist scholarship in Europe. Activists and scholars have shown its occurrence and significance in Western societies, in contrast to previous attitudes that deemed this phenomenon only relevant in the global South. Simultaneously, postcolonial-queer-feminist scholars and activists point out and analyze the weaponization of sexual violence by anti-gender and anti-feminist discourses and movements to stigmatize migrant communities and postcolonial societies as inherently violent and misogynistic. Along the same line, female migrants and third-world women are constructed as 'helpless victims' of their cultures and societies, thereby justifying Western' rescue narratives. Against this background, this talk analyzes the instrumentalization of women's rights discourse by right-wing politics and mobilizations. Specifically, it questions whether and how the instrumentalization of gender-based violence reinforces racist and patriarchal structures in Germany.